Iain Crawford

Studies in the Novel, 20:3 (Fall 1988), 249-61

{249} The recent and extraordinary burgeoning of scholarly
interest in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has combined an
increasing appreciation of the novel's psychological, mythic,
and literary subtexts with a growing respect for the
intellectual force and resilience of its youthful author.1 While
following this general trend, my specific concern here is
three-fold and touches upon several underlying areas of the
text, examining aspects of its intertextuality which have not
previously come to critical attention and relating these both to
the narratorial postures of the principal male protagonist and
to Mary Shelley herself in her relations with her father and her
husband. Thus I hope, first, to explore a passing, yet revealing
allusion the novel makes to John Hampden, a leader of the
Parliamentary cause before and during the English Civil War.
Secondly, I shall suggest that, through Hampden,
Frankenstein is also indebted to Gray's Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard. Although this latter debt is one which has
passed unnoticed in the attention given to more readily visible
intertexts such as Paradise
Lost, The Sorrows
of Young Werther, and The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, I hope to show that Frankenstein does
indeed allude to Gray's poem and to argue that, as well as
further enriching a novel already permeated with the texture of
English literary discourse, these allusions help to develop the
presentation of Victor's inner life and to place it in the
larger mythic context of rebellion against divine authority.
Finally, and as a matter of some interest in the case of a novel
whose very genesis has always been problematic, I shall consider
how the allusions to Hampden and Gray not only form an ironic
commentary upon Victor's anti-patriarchal revolt but also
intimate a covert response by Mary to an enthusiastic idealism
in Percy and Godwin that she appears to have found at least
partially suspect.

{250} John Hampden, who lived from 1594 to 1643, was "the
richest commoner in England"2 and a figure of considerable
importance both during the period leading up to the Civil War
and, until his death, in the actual conflict itself. As the
principal opponent of the royalist tax known as Ship-Money and
as orchestrator of the Grand Remonstrance, a populist petition
against the monarch, he was instrumental in focusing discontent
with Charles I and thus in
preparing the ground for the outbreak of the Civil War. Once the
war began, he turned his abilities to military leadership,
acting as one of Cromwell's principal generals
until being mortally wounded in a minor skirmish near
Chillingworth in 1643. Posthumously, Hampden gained the
reputation of having been a martyr to the cause of national
liberty and, in the words of his most recent biographer, his
name thus "entered the language as a symbol for patriotism."3

Not perhaps surprisingly, it was in this light that he was
viewed by the more liberal writers of the early nineteenth
century. Percy Shelley
makes numerous enthusiastic allusions to Hampden, commenting,
for example, on the less than entirely Glorious Revolution, "my
blood boils to think that Sidney's and Hampden's blood was
wasted thus." A response containing similar approbation if
slightly less hyperbolic language is also to be found in Godwin's 1824 volume,
History of the Commonwealth of England, where Hampden is
described as "one of the most extraordinary men in the records
of mankind." Less extravagantly and in a manner characteristic
of his influence upon early Victorian thought, Carlyle set the
tone for a revival of interest in Hampden with an 1822 notebook
entry:

Hampden and Washington are the two people best loved of
any in history. Yet they had few illustrious qualities about
them; only a high degree of shrewd business-like activity, and
above all that honest-hearted unaffected probity, which we
patriotically name English, in a higher degree than
almost any public men commemorated in history.

The Whig historian, Lord Nugent, followed in much the same vein
with his 1831 biography of Hampden, a book that occasioned a
lively debate over Hampden's historical status and which in
particular prompted a celebrated response from Macaulay. Further
evidence of a continuing interest in Hampden is offered by the
attention John Forster gives him in an 1837 volume in the
Cabinet Cyclopedia series, and it was only when Carlyle
redefined discussion of the Civil War with his 1845 edition of
Cromwell's Letters and Speeches that Hampden was
superseded in early Victorian thought by his more celebrated
cousin.4

In Frankenstein, Hampden makes what at first seems a
somewhat gratuitous appearance during chapter 19 when Victor and
Henry Clerval prolong their journey towards Scotland by remaining some
time in Oxford and indulging
themselves with frequent excursions into the surrounding area:

{251} We visited the tomb of the illustrious Hampden, and the
field on which that patriot fell. For a moment my soul was
elevated from its debasing and miserable fears, to contemplate
the divine ideas of liberty and self-sacrifice, of which these
sights were the monuments and the remembrancers. For an instant
I dared to shake off my chains, and look around me with a free
and lofty spirit; but the iron had eaten into my flesh, and I
sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self.5

Hampden's presence at this point in the novel may be owing to
any or all of three possible factors: the enthusiasm for him
which Percy and Godwin frequently expressed; a perhaps not
entirely unrelated visit to his monument which Godwin and his
daughter made in October 1817, during the period
of preparing Frankenstein for the press, and which Mary
records in her Journal;6 and, finally, his wider reputation
in English writing -- in particular, a reference to him in
Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. While the
exact reasons for his entering Shelley's novel remain elusive,
his significance in the text is, if by no means simple, then
perhaps more readily decipherable.

Though Hampden was seen by progressive writers as an opponent of
political repression and a martyr who died in the cause of
liberty, his life and career were also open to interpretation as
an exemplar of the ambivalencies of revolutionary action. In
particular, as a leader of the Parliamentary cause and thus an
opponent of Charles I, God's representative upon British soil,
he could easily be regarded as a precursor of that tendency to
resist patriarchal authority which had, since 1789, become such a
fundamental and unsettling motif of European culture. The
ambivalence of such revolts is, of course, central to
Frankenstein and, indeed, immediately before he recounts
the visit to Hampden's tomb, Victor himself describes Oxford and
nostalgically remembers how "the memory of that unfortunate king
. . . gave a peculiar interest to every part of the city" (p. 159). As is so characteristic
of his narrative, he thus incorporates into the text
implications of which he is unaware and which, in fact,
ironically undermine his own positions. For, while associating
himself with Hampden and his usurpation of the monarch's
divinely-bestowed power, Victor also appears to be sentimentally
bonded to remembrances of the unfortunate king; he thereby
articulates an uncertainty that both lies at the very heart of
his anti-patriarchal revolt and which also constantly threatens
to undermine the stability of his narrative as a whole.

As has been widely noted, Victor's entire project is
fundamentally motivated by the terms of his relationship with
his own father, since it is in essence his response to that
expulsion from domestic bliss into the larger world which
initiates the novel's main action. Even here, however, his
motivations are characteristically ambivalent and go beyond any
simple attempt to revenge himself upon the ostensibly tyrannical
parent who orders his initial separation from the secure world
of childhood. For he is not unaware that, in being forced out of
the nest, he is also embarking upon a voyage of {252} discovery;
as M. Krempe reminds him soon after his arrival in Ingolstadt,
he has been living in a "desert land" (p. 46) and will only fulfil his
potential by embracing the opportunities available in the larger
world. Nevertheless, the purity of Victor's scientific pursuits
is clearly qualified by a complex of motivations that involves
his feelings towards his father, dead mother, and Elizabeth,
and, while the exact balance of his inner life may remain open
to debate, there can be no doubting the part in it of an
intensely rebellious anti-patriarchal impulse. Paradoxically,
however, his revolt includes the desire to attain the very
degree of control against which he himself rebels:

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first
break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.
A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many
happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No
father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I
should deserve theirs. (p.
54)

In actuality, of course, Victor is to prove a less than happy
originator of the species and will be incessantly wracked by the
oscillations in his feelings towards the creature he has
made.

As his narrative develops, moreover, such confusions in his
roles as both son and parent become ever more manifest. On the
one hand, he will align himself with the Monster by revealing a
submerged self-perception in the terms of Satan's rebellion against his
tyrannical father (p. 182). On the other, he greets
M. Frankenstein's arrival at the Irish jail rapturously: "the
appearance of my father was to me like that of my good angel,
and I gradually recovered my health" (p. 181). In an apparent endeavor
to resolve this contradiction, he resorts to the stratagem of
finding justification for his revenge by presenting it as a
mission of justice "enjoined by heaven" (p. 204), which, he feels, guides
him across the wastes of Europe in search of his enemy.
Notwithstanding this evidently specious device, he and his
creation, in fact, move towards and then past one another until,
by the final phase of the novel and during the pursuit across
the Arctic, hunter and
hunted seem almost indistinguishable: for Victor sinks into the
obsessive, hateful spirit of revenge that had earlier motivated
the Monster, while his quarry takes on that mantle of eloquent
sensitivity which had first attracted Walton to the dying
scientist. Ultimately, however, each recognizes the sterility of
his life and, though Victor never does quite renounce his
rebellious ambitions completely, both he and the Monster end the
novel in the utter defeat of having destroyed all those to whom
they have ties and, in particular, the patriarchs from whom they
derive their existences and much of their signification.

While it would certainly be extravagant to suggest that Shelley
reinterprets John Hampden as radically as she and other Romantic
writers metamorphosed the Satan of Paradise Lost, her allusion
may nevertheless be seen as offering {253} a somewhat less
straightforward interpretation than that widely current in the
early nineteenth century. Indeed, such ambivalence is entirely
characteristic of a novel whose principal quality is its sense
of the final undecidability of human motivation and behavior, a
sense evident in the presentations of both Hampden and Victor
Frankenstein. If in Victor's eyes Hampden is a glorious rebel
and martyr, a prototype of his own struggle against patriarchal
authority, both historical precedent and the text itself remind
us of the penalty often exacted for such rebellions. For
Hampden, the price to be paid was death in an obscure skirmish
and the loss of opportunity to see the outcome of his efforts
for the revolution; Victor, too, dies, but with a more confirmed
sense of failure and defeat. And yet, just as Victor refuses
entirely to abandon his dreams at the last, so too Hampden's
cause would triumph, even though it may be wondered how he would
have reacted to the eventual course Cromwell's revolutionary
rule took. Both history and the literary text thus seem to pass
mixed verdicts upon their subjects, then: while they condemn
Hampden and Victor to their respective defeats, they also still
manage to suggest simultaneously both the magnitude of
individual aspiration and achievement and yet also a tantalizing
sense of the constraints which mortality places upon human
ambition, knowledge, and endeavor.

With Victor himself, it is precisely the habit of mind which
conditions his comments upon Hampden that leads to failure. For
his attitude to the Parliamentary leader suggests an inability
to escape from paradigmatic perceptions in his viewing of the
world around him. Like the Monster, Victor is incapable of
seeing life other than through inherited patterns of literary
discourse, and, while the Monster has good reason for basing his
perceptions upon the texts which are almost his only source of
knowledge, Victor himself cannot be so readily excused. William
Veeder has recently argued that Victor has the mind of a Gothic
protagonist and that he sees the entire world in the terms of Gothic fiction.7 Similarly, I
would suggest, he also regards himself as a latter-day Hampden,
a Romantic version of the figure Clarendon described as almost
the savior of his age: "And I am persuaded his power and
interest at that time was greater to do good or hurt than any
man's in the kingdom, or than any man in his rank hath had in
any time."8
Victor likewise considers himself to possess the ability to
bestow unique blessings upon mankind, a notion which proves
extremely corrosive since it enables him to cloak the chaos of
his inner life in a veil of benevolence and thus to proceed
along his grisly trail unhindered, indeed perversely encouraged,
by the proddings of his conscience. And yet, so great is the
need to construct layers of protective auto-valorization about
himself that even this level of self-defence does not prove
sufficient, and he appears ever more concerned to present
himself as speaking his own elegy and to justify, if hardly the
ways of God to man, then surely his own motivations and
actions.

{254} For, if his allusion to Hampden derives in part from a
broad cultural interest in the man, it may also simultaneously
owe something to a parallel literary source -- that of Gray's
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, where reference is
made to the fallen martyr:

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little Tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.9

Circumstantially, there are several reasons to assume that the
Elegy was, indeed, an influence upon
Frankenstein: the emphasis here is evidently in the
mainstream of historical interpretation of Hampden's role; the
poem itself was a central intertext in the Romantics' definition
of the nature and function of poetry; and its elegiac stance
towards a melancholy subject is a posture which offers
considerable attractions to Victor's sense of his own
narrative.

Gray's poem achieved enormous popularity upon its publication in
1751 and rapidly became a touchstone of the English literary
imagination. Johnson's celebrated description of its abounding
with "images which find a mirror in every mind, and with
sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo," and his
judgement that "Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to
blame, and useless to praise him" readily suggest the power the
Elegy soon came to have. The duality lurking in this
latter comment, however, is developed further in Romantic
responses both to the poem itself and to its author's wider
achievement. Thus while Wordsworth in the Preface
to Lyrical Ballads was to pillorize Gray as epitomizing
the limitations of eighteenth-century poetic style, the
Elegy itself seems to have remained immune to attack and
become a text held in near universal affection and respect. In
Biographia Literaria, for example, Coleridge, too, is willing
to express considerable criticism of Gray's work at large, but
steadfastly defends the Elegy itself as a poem he cannot
read "without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm." In the
writings of Shelley's circle, we also find evidence of this
divided response: Percy Shelley alludes favorably to there being
"a line to be drawn between affectation of unpossessed talents,
and the deceit of self distrust by which much power has been
lost to the world for 'full many a flower is born to blush
unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.' -- This
line may be called the 'modesty of nature.'" On the other hand,
in her unfinished short story, "The Cave of Fancy," Mary
Wollstonecraft quotes the same lines, only to then deny that a
true poet remains "mute" and "inglorious"; rather, "those only
grovel who have not power to fly".10 While specific evidence of Mary
Shelley's acquaintance with the poem does not appear to exist,
there seems every reason to believe that such a precociously
well-read author as she was in 1816 would have known
what was already a standard text. Moreover, {255} in both the
direct allusion to Hampden and then in the more general nature
of his motivation, Victor Frankenstein suggests that the
Elegy is indeed of considerable importance to his own
narrative. For, to borrow Michael Rifaterre's term, what Victor
apparently does is "scramble" his intertext in order to generate
a meaning for his own narrative that is both wedded to and yet
subtly distinct from its model.11

Linking Frankenstein's three narratives is a single
underlying conflict that is at the heart of the Elegy and
which George Levine has seen to be central to nineteenth-century
realistic fiction: that between "a simultaneous awe and
reverence toward greatness of ambition, and fear and distrust of
those who act on it."12 It is this tension that both
drives Victor, Walton, and the Monster in their journeys of
discovery and self-discovery, yet which also leaves them
naggingly dissatisfied with their lives. While in each case this
opposition clearly overlays a more complex psychology, the
actual tension between the desire for ambitious exploration of
the universe at large and a yearning towards the passive
satisfactions of domesticity is evidently central to the text as
a whole and forms a vital part in the motivations of each of the
three male narrators. It is perhaps Victor who most clearly
articulates the dilemma they all feel in the contrast that
emerges between two of the intertexts upon which he draws in the
framing of his narrative.

For, on the one hand, he is eager to liken his scientific
explorations to the voyage of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner; on the
other, he structures his text in cautionary terms close to those
of Gray's Elegy. The debt to Coleridge has been widely
noted and, in fact, not only Victor but also Walton, and Mary
Shelley herself in the Introduction to the novel's 1831 edition
make reference to the Ancient Mariner as a means of
describing their explorations beyond the pale of normal human
endeavor (pp. 9, 21, 151-52). Although the novel
thus might at one level partake of the poem's ostensible moral
edict to love both creatures great and small, the relationship
between the two texts is perhaps more profoundly seen in their
common focus upon the forces of creative obsession, the demonic
capacities of the human mind, and the destructive energies
released when these two clash.

In this context, Victor's submerged allusions to the
Elegy appear to stand as a corrective admonition intended
to deter Walton (and, by implication, the reader) from following
in his footsteps: "Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at
least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of
knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his
native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become
greater than his nature will allow" (p. 53). Though this quietist
sentiment and the "apt moral" (p. 30) it implies for the text
at large are almost a commonplace of eighteenth-century writing,
the particular phrasing here is close to that of Gray's narrator
in the Elegy. For the speaker and protagonist of the poem
also repeatedly evokes the stable tranquillity of rural life as
an antidote to the dangerous temptations of ambition:

{258} Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor. (29-32)

Both he and Victor find much to praise in those who resist the
pull towards the larger world and who, "Far from the madding
crowd's ignoble strife . . . Along the cool
sequester'd vale of life" (73,
75), retain a more measured view of mortal existence.
Victor, indeed, sees humanity's recurring failure to achieve
such stability as having immense historical significance: "If no
man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the
tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been
enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would
have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico
and Peru had not been destroyed" (p. 56). For Victor himself,
however, this ideal proves unattainable and must be transposed
into Elizabeth and, to a lesser degree, Henry Clerval, both of
whom embody the rewards of a life responsive to the language of
Nature and the attainment of tranquillity in rural retirement
(pp. 36, 64, 156). For the narrator of the
poem, the conditioning factor is an inescapable sense of the
ultimate frustrations of mortality:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave. (33-36)

Clearly, if had Victor taken his own advice -- and that of the
Elegy -- Elizabeth, Henry, and his other victims would
have been spared the consequences of both his virtues and, more
importantly, his vices, since rural immolation could have saved
them just as it spared Gray's humble villagers, as it:

nor
circumscrib'd alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin'd;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind.
(65-68)

And yet, though Victor is unable to accept the finality of death
and while his victims could certainly have benefited from an
infusion of the temperance he and the narrator of the
Elegy urge, both texts ultimately remain ambivalent about
the ideal they overtly present and suggest a more complex
response than that encoded in the moral of simple retirement.

The opposing forces that lie below the surface of the
Elegy have recently been considered by Howard Weinbrot in
a discussion which may also shed light upon Mary Shelley's
novel.13
Weinbrot suggests that, at the outset of {257} the poem, the
narrator finds himself in a state of alienation from nature, the
village, and his own obscure lot; as the poem develops, it
reveals the "flux and counter-flux of an emotionally charged
argument"14
while the speaker endeavors to come to terms with the life of
obscure retirement in which he finds himself; and finally,
though he never does become a joyful member of the village
community, he at least "learns to resign himself to ordinary
human affection; he associates himself with his neighboring,
humble people and landscape and, in the process, leaves the
definition of his hidden, true character to God."15

Victor's approximation to yet distinct difference from such a
position is evident. Like the speaker of Gray's poem, he is
dissatisfied with the whole notion of living a modestly obscure
life, and he thus becomes wretchedly self-exiled from the world
in which he finds himself. Rejecting the pastoral retreat to
which both his father retires and in which Gray's narrator
eventually finds peace, he endeavors to aggrandize to himself
the entire universe through his creation of life itself. Even in
this, however, he lacks a stabilizing "steady purpose" (p. 16), since he also retains
his more socialized values and, being made a coward by his own
conscience, proves unable to embrace his ambitions
wholeheartedly. For, again like Gray's character, if for very
different reasons, he too is incapable of blushing unseen in the
desert air and is thus tormented by the combination of
restlessness in domestic tranquillity and a mixture of
attraction to and repulsion from the project through which he
endeavors to achieve greatness. Where Victor most essentially
differs from his predecessor is in his inability to perceive or
accept an overriding value in patriarchal or divine guidance,
since he not only rejects his own father but also, until late in
his narrative, shows no interest whatsoever in the codes of
religious belief. As a result of this solipsism, he becomes
isolated. Failing to overcome his isolation, he slides into an
ever more dominant obsession with the Monster, its creation and
then its -- and thus his own -- destruction. Gray's protagonist,
by contrast, for all his prevarications, never loses a sense of
the virtues of the common people amongst whom he finds himself,
and so, even though his death is not unlike Victor's in being
caused by an overburden of sorrow, he at least has come to some
accommodation with his fate:

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heav'n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear,
He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a
friend. (121-24)

With this distinction in the relations between the protagonist
and the external world the two texts are once again both bonded
and yet ultimately separate. For it is clearly a similar
yearning for companionship which motivates not only Victor but
also Walton and the Monster -- a hunger which is doomed {258} to
go unassuaged. As Stephen Cox has argued, in the case of the
Elegy the yearning for social sympathy expresses a need
for a sense of the significance of individual life and
constitutes an alternative to a religious belief which the
narrator finds himself unable to sustain. Cox suggests that the
conclusion of the poem shows Gray's narrator as having achieved
both the ability to trust to the "pure emotion" of a stable
sensibility and the capacity to accept human limitations as "a
background against which the self can display its dignity of
feeling."16
The triumph may, indeed, be still greater, since the protagonist
has also managed to find that larger "trembling hope" in "The
bosom of his Father and his God" (127-28). It is, of course,
in precisely these respects that Victor and his counterparts are
most deficient: in Shelley's text a term such as "pure emotion"
is a dangerous oxymoron and Victor is never able to achieve
emotional resolutions to match those of Gray's character.
Moreover, his narrative, despite all its insistence upon the
inescapability of his destiny (pp. 30, 42, 181), not only ignores God but
also persistently refuses to distance itself from the
individualistic code of Promethean achievement which
it ostensibly condemns. For Victor's last words turn out to be
anything but the elegiac renunciation of past errors his earlier
admonition to Walton might have led one to expect:

"Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity, and avoid
ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of
distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I
say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another
may succeed." (pp. 217-18)

Though Victor dies, the Monster vanishes, and Walton is forced
to return to England, the narrative thus refuses to endorse any
simple moral as to the value of ambition and the challenging of
established authority and thus calls into question its own
status as the cautionary tale it has claimed to be.

Finally, the allusions to Hampden and Gray may also have a
degree of significance for Mary Shelley and the men who
dominated her own life, since they perhaps discretely suggest
Mary's commentary upon the intense idealism which marks both her
father's and husband's thought and writings. Professor Veeder's
useful suggestion that Mary's "critical examination of all
paradigms . . . is what drives her and her readers
beyond Victor's self-justifying explanations to the darker
teleology of him and Percy"17 is relevant here. There is no
doubting that both Godwin and Percy knew Gray's poem and were
enthusiastic about Hampden; Percy's idolizing, in particular, is
entirely characteristic of both his fundamental political views
and his general tendency towards hero-worship. That Mary was not
quite so taken with this radical version of the blessed martyr
may be suggested by the levity of her tone in a letter to Hunt
during the composition of Frankenstein. Alluding to
Hampden's resistance to the Ship-Money levy, she wrote:

{259} Shelley & Peacock have started a question which I do
not esteem myself wise enough to decide upon -- and yet as they
seem determined to act on it I wish them to have the best
advise. As a prelude to this you must be reminded that
Hamden was of Bucks and our two worthies want to be his
successors for which reason they intend to refuse to pay the
taxes as illegally imposed -- What effect will this have &
ought they do it is the question? Pray let me know your
opinion.18

Similarly, Victor's language -- "For an instant I dared to shake
off my chains, and look around me with a free and lofty spirit;
but the iron had eaten into my flesh, and I sank again,
trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self" (p. 160) -- in recounting the
visit to Hampden's tomb is markedly, if not indeed parodically
Shelleyan in both its terminology and tone. What the allusions
to Gray and Hampden show in the overall text of
Frankenstein, moreover, is that such idealization tends
to be simplistic, to overlie and disguise more complex
psychological processes, and, when transformed out of theory and
into concrete effect, to become almost wholly pernicious in its
operations. Thus, the fates of both Hampden and Victor, together
with the wider intertextual questioning of Victor's ambitions
which the novel offers, all suggest not only his failings but
also, perhaps, limitations in the ideals and psychology of
Godwin and, especially, Percy himself. Accordingly, they may
well represent another facet of that discrete rebellion against
the patriarchal authority of her father and her husband that a
number of critics have discerned in Mary's writings, and, if
such indeed be the case, Frankenstein can in this respect
also be seen as a critique of the larger character of Romantic idealism.19 That Mary
should have voiced her qualifications in this covert manner need
hardly be surprising, since there is little cause to assume that
she articulated them fully even to herself and every reason for
understanding why they should have remained disguised in
print.

Victor's narrative, then, through its reference to Hampden and
allusion to Gray articulates an ambivalence at the very heart of
his revolt and perhaps also implies a larger critique of the
radical ideology to which Mary herself was exposed by the
circumstances of her life. He and, to a lesser degree, Walton
and the Monster attempt to exert control over others and the
world at large through the power that comes from unrivalled
possession of unique forms of knowledge. In each case, however,
the endeavor is shown to mask an underlying psychic instability
which eventually, inevitably leads to failure. For the purposes
of this discussion, I have focused upon the anti-patriarchal
character of the struggle, concentrating largely on Victor; a
broader consideration of the novel might valuably also examine
Walton and the Monster in the same light and relate all three
male narrators to the misogynic elements in the text.
Nevertheless, even while some part of my argument must, in the
absence of indisputably specific evidence for Mary's debt to
Gray, finally remain speculative, Hampden's place in the text is
clear. Though his and the {260} novel's connection with Gray's
Elegy can be claimed only to the extent that I have
attempted here, such a link may well indicate yet one more way
in which this endlessly suggestive text weds its own delving
into the human psyche with an extraordinary sensitivity to the
major intertexts of English literature and, out of this union,
produces a novel unmatched in its expression of the final
undecidability of human emotions and conduct.

Notes

1. The growth of scholarly interest in
Frankenstein is best evidenced by the listing contained
in Frederick S. Frank's compendious survey, "Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein: A Register of Research," Bulletin of
Bibliography 40 (1983): 163-88.

2. Christopher Hill, Puritanism and
Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution
of the 17th Century (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), p.
11.

3. John Adair, A Life of John Hampden: The
Patriot (London: Macdonald and Jane's, 1976), p. 249.

4. The references in this paragraph are, in the
order they appear, to: The Letters of Percy Bysshe
Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1964), 1:264; Godwin, History of the Commonwealth of
England, from its Commencement to the Restoration of Charles the
Second, 4 vols. (London: n.p. 1824-1828), 1:11; Carlyle's
notebook is cited in Charles Richard Sanders, Carlyle's
Friendships and Other Studies (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press,
1977), p. 28; Lord Nugent's 1831 biography, Memorials of John
Hampden, encountered Macaulay's response in the Edinburgh
Review for December of that year.

5.Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus,
ed. M. K. Joseph (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), p. 160. All references are to
this edition and will be inserted parenthetically.

9.The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray, H.
W. Starr and J. R. Hendrickson, eds. (Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1966), 11.57-60.
Further quotations will be taken from this edition and inserted
parenthetically.

19. The breadth of Mary's concern with
contemporary political issues and her belief in "evolutionary
radicalism" rather than violent revolt is apparent from a series
of letters recently discovered in Australia which will appear in
the forthcoming third volume of Betty T. Bennett's definitive
edition of the correspondence. These letters, as described by
Herbert Mitgang, "A Hunch on Mary Shelley Pays Off," The New
York Times, 2 Dec. 1987, national ed., p. 29, suggest that,
while deeply committed to libertarian ideals, Mary was more
pragmatic than either Godwin or Percy in her sense of how they
might be achieved.